The E-commerce Leader

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[00:00:00] KH: all the devices you can do when you’re recruiting to find above average talent, uh, may or may not result in you actually hiring an above average, you know, talented. So therefore build a system that an average person can operate and thrive in,
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[00:01:21] KH: people are one of the, okay, I’ll try that again. Take two, take two, take two. Take two. People are one of the largest expenses in a business, but they’re also one of the most tricky parts of a business to manage. Oftentimes, entrepreneurs fall into the trap of simply saying, ah, I’m gonna do it all myself.
[00:01:47] Sometimes that works, but sometimes it radically. Your business is potential. And in this episode, we’re gonna discuss this whole idea of human deficiency syndrome, uh, phrase I just coined. And we’re gonna figure out how to encourage you along the way with eight tips for overcoming this type of problem.
[00:02:07] Michael, are you ready to jump into this?
[00:02:09] MV: Yeah. I like this. I like this syndrome. Gets my attention. That’s quite entertaining. Human deficiency syndrome. Um, there you go. Yeah. I like this. So what, what do you mean, it’s an odd phrase. What do you, why have you chosen that particular
[00:02:21] KH: phrase? Well, it, it’s a phrase that hearkens back to, I know it’s sort of a funny reference, but, um, actually not funny at all.
[00:02:28] Um, there was a time when I was doing a lot of charity work in Africa related to hiv aids and, um, before hiv aids was actually phrased. People in Africa would call it the wasting D disease. And uh, people would just become emaciated and then die and they didn’t know what was happening. And um, you know, this was real early in the, in the, you know, story of hiv aids and, um, but these people, if they got on, um, uh, the right medication would make this amazing.
[00:02:56] They call it Lazarus effect. Amazing Bounce. And, uh, once the antiretrovirals started to be introduced. And so, um, so anyway, so, so it’s sort of an odd reference, but I think a lot of businesses can go through this situation where it’s a good business. You know, like it, it’s a vibrant business. Maybe it’s got a great product or that kind of thing, but the people in it are just completely and totally wasting away or non-existent.
[00:03:23] I mean, just literally like, uh, you know, not thriving at. And, um, as business owners, that’s ours to figure out, you know, it’s, it’s our thing to sort out and ask ourselves a question are, are we creating a context in which the people in our business are thriving? Are we finding them? Are we adding them? Are they thriving?
[00:03:41] Or is this a problem? Um, and so I guess that’s sort of what was, uh, my, my thought process as I was thinking about this whole idea of businesses challenged. Finding and retaining and thriving, having people thrive, if that’s a thriving people, I guess. Use it as a verb or something, but there you go.
[00:04:00] MV: Thriving is good verb. That’s an American disease. Don’t do that. I’m sorry. Thriving is a perfectly happy adjective. So what this makes me think of, um, kind of throwing a span in the works, but hopefully not. You know, if we think about it in the broader sense, um, Seth Godin, there was a, a podcast to listened to again the other day talking about the difference between a freelancer, entrepreneur, and I think mm-hmm.
[00:04:22] It’s really, really critical to be clear about which you are. Yeah. And which you aspire to be. For example, I had a client who built a business to a me mere sort of early seven figures revenue, but he sold it for seven figures cuz it was incredibly profitable. Plus he exited at. Exact time when aggregators were buying any Amazon business with a pulse, it seemed, and it was very profitable.
[00:04:43] Don’t get me wrong, it’s a desirable business in any era. Uh, but he was not really a team builder. He tried adding a, a VA at one point and it didn’t really, wasn’t his thing. And so he was a, so he was smart enough to recognize that and sold it onto somebody else who was gonna grow a team around it. So I think it’s interesting that some of us.
[00:05:04] You know, um, need to get better at this, and that’s what we’re talking about. Some of us, you know, maybe need to recognize that that’s not a strength. Yeah. And no, that’s an different situation, right? So
[00:05:13] KH: Yeah. But I would, I would counter your counter your span in the wor spanner in the works that, um, any endeavor that you do online, whether you want to be a solopreneur or not, is gonna be radically difficult to do a hundred percent by.
[00:05:30] So just for example, I mean, let’s just say you wanna be a ghost rider, you know, and all you wanna do is, you know, be a ghost rider for people. Well, um, where are you gonna get your leads and who’s gonna print your, uh, business card and, uh, who’s gonna do your taxes? And, you know, there’s so many services that are really bolted onto a business, even at the smallest level that enable it to thrive.
[00:05:54] That I would just argue that even if you wanna be a solopreneur, you gotta get good at working with people and finding people, even if they’re just service providers to you. And they’re not W2 employees, as we’d phrase it in the us. Um, uh, so, so I take your point, there are certainly people who wanna build a big business and certainly people who deliberately don’t want to build a big business.
[00:06:14] But all of us have to get good at, um, finding and working with, uh, people who enable our success. I guess you. How does that
[00:06:22] MV: Well, look, I’ve tried wiggle out of getting good at it seems absolutely right. I think you, I’ve tried to wiggle out of having to develop the skillset and, and discovered that I cannot get away from human deficiency syndrome.
[00:06:32] We all need people. You are quite right. So we’re gonna have to deal with this. So what, what are your ideas for overcoming. Yes, obviously resistance and it may to some degree, and some of the people I work with even more, I’ve gotta say. But how we, well, let’s explore that for
[00:06:45] KH: a minute. Wait, wait. We gotta, we gotta, we gotta pause and not to armchair psychoanalyze you or anything, but why, why does this put put up a little bit of a defensiveness in your heart or mind as we talk about the, it’s not
[00:06:58] MV: supposed defensive.
[00:06:59] It’s, it’s the fact that as, uh, an agency owner came on the podcast recently, Jeff Sour, who’s a really smart guy, he, um, built an agency to eight figures and sold it. And he said the thing about an agency that’s hard compared to scaling a products business, um, is this, that the more you scale products, the better they tend to get, because, you know, you have your first batch from the factory, or if it’s handmade, whatever the production process is, they’re gonna be some floors.
[00:07:22] You know, maybe in, you know, in the case of. Your poor wife, cinnamon, you know, exhaustion, the wonderful quality product, but, but exhausted workers. Sometimes it’s the other way round. The quality’s terrible and you have to go back and the second, third version is better. But by the time you’ve done your 10000th unit, it’s normally pretty slick, right?
[00:07:39] With people. He said. The trouble is, it’s not like that at all. The more you try a hire you, you’re competing with a lot of similar people competing with the same talent pool. Mm. And it doesn’t get better for the 10,000 employees likely to be a lot worse than the first one. And so, yeah, I guess that’s one of the reasons for resistance.
[00:07:55] I’m one of the reasons, to your point, where it is a bit of a human growth efficiency in many businesses, cuz it’s kind of hard. Yeah,
[00:08:03] KH: yeah. No, I, I think that’s completely right. And you know, there are a lot of reasons in our minds as we think through this as to why we would say, eh, not so much. Don’t want to go here.
[00:08:14] That is a perfectly interesting description. The other reality is the bigger your team gets, the more complicated it gets to manage. And just a law of statistics like probability. If you hire 10 people, how many of ’em are gonna be problems for you? And how many of ’em are gonna be problem solvers? Well, you might get a couple problem solvers and you might get, you know, three or four or five problems.
[00:08:37] And so there’s, you know, that’s the, the downside too. So there you have it.
[00:08:44] MV: Yeah, I guess it comes to what you’re drawn to, doesn’t it? I mean, obviously you’ve got a, a giant background in hr, uh, in your, you know, former corporate days when you work for I think a billion dollar charity. Right. It’s a pretty huge outfit.
[00:08:54] Mm-hmm. So I guess you are probably more drawn to solving these kinds of problems than, than the rest of us, perhaps me. Uh, that’s funny. Talking about this. I’m like, yeah, there’s more resistance here than I’d expect on this topic. Obviously, uh, I’m struggling with this. So, so what are, what are our solutions?
[00:09:08] You got, you’ve got a few solutions here, so what’s, [00:09:10] what’s the first thing that we need to do to turn this thing around?
[00:09:13] KH: Yeah, it actually fits nicely with what we were just talking about. The first solution, I think, is to envision a positive, uh, you know, outcome for a team-based approach to your business.
[00:09:22] Or I guess say in another way, envision a team running your business successfully. That’s the first, I think, and most important thing to really ponder. Like, what, what is it you’re building? I mean, you know, it’s, uh, you know, classic advice like, I think, well, it was even Jesus, I think before someone builds a tower they need to take account or whatever, you know, so that’s just classic.
[00:09:47] You want to envision what your architecture looks like for a team. Before you, uh, you know, jump into it. Many times we don’t do that. Of course, as entrepreneurs, we’re just overwhelmed. We’re just like, you know, we’re, we’re underwater mentally, emotionally, and in every way, and we’re just grasping for, you know, a life preserver and we find the first person we can, you know, add into the company and be like, throw some stuff at ’em.
[00:10:09] Like, you, you, you do this cuz I think it’ll help me. You know? But that’s not the. Engineer a business. I mean, that’s not, you know, with human capital involved, the, the way to really do it is to sit down and say, what was a ideal team look like in terms of the duties and functions? And, you know, what am I good at personally?
[00:10:26] What do I hate? Uh, and how do I build a team that is a lean, mean fighting machine that helps us win, uh, as a group? And, and I think that that envisioning process is, is really important. And maybe even if we’re up and going every year, we should sit back. Take a day off and say, what, what is the ideal team for this next phase of her growth?
[00:10:48] You know, I
[00:10:49] MV: like that a lot. I mean, I think, um, I wish I were more like that when I started out being a team manager or, or a hire. Um, I’m discover. Covering through the school of hard knocks. The truth that I read in several business books a few years ago, which is like have clearly defined roles and don’t mush all the tasks into one role.
[00:11:07] Turns out those guys were absolutely correct and I’m gradually changing the role of the people I work with now. For example, the poor podcast editor, Bon, who’d probably be editing this is now the podcast content manager, but I’m taking. Say things like that. Um, executive assistant person, assistant type things like email triage because you’re somehow struggling to get it in and, and look at the amount of stuff he’s got to do.
[00:11:27] I’m like, you know, it’s not in the same skillset. And the, the acid test for me was simple. Some stuff he reliably delivered and that made sense and I was very happy and some. Some stuff just wasn’t happening. And, um, I dug into it and I think I was just overwhelming him with too much stuff. But also it wasn’t, um, feeding back into the same skillset.
[00:11:44] It wasn’t enabling him even. It was a different skillset, like sending an email to a guest to say, Hey, your content’s live, people help us promote that. At least links into the guest whose name he saw on. Our schedule and whose content he’s edited. There’s, there’s a sort of unity to his work now. So we’ve stripped away, literally a couple of days ago, I had a, a meeting said, why isn’t this working?
[00:12:04] And he said, overwhelmed. I said, okay, let’s strip the roll down. So I’ve officially relinquished my expectation that he will do certain things that he wasn’t doing anyway, but was, I was getting annoyed about. So there you go. I think, um, I’ve kind of done it through the School of stupidity, the same thing, which is like getting some unity to the, the
[00:12:20] KH: whole thing.
[00:12:22] Yeah. I think it’s one of those examples where it’s like, if you don’t build this right before you will be building it. Right. And while the ship is on the water. Or the train rolling down the tracks. I mean, you know, through more painful, through your phrase, the school of the School of Hard knocks version of building your team.
[00:12:38] Yeah. Um, one way or the other, or you’ll fail, or you know, or you know, people will quit and, you know, people vote with their feet. People get too frustrated, they leave. Um, and if you get too frustrated, you, you know, kind of blow your stack and fire people or, you know, Wanna quit yourself, which is hard to do when it’s your business, you know?
[00:12:57] So, yeah. So, but I think this whole idea of taking a step back, taking a minute, envisioning something really, really well organized and you, you know, doodling it out on paper. Hmm. Um, what roles do you need? What, what roles would be services that could be provided by agencies? What roles would need to be full-time team?
[00:13:17] What role could be part-time, uh, international, you know, uh, VA type roles, et cetera, et cetera. I mean, all of that goes into it and you can build a really, really, uh, well thought out team.
[00:13:28] MV: Yeah, I think my final point to that is, um, can’t think what I was gonna say. You just edit that out. Fun. Your first job of editing.
[00:13:35] Um, so talking of. Starting underwater. That really leads me to the second thing, which is a lot of us reach out when we need somebody and do it in rather a hurry, and I’ve certainly been that person in the past, but I guess that’s not the ideal way to do it, is it? So I think that leads into your second point here.
[00:13:52] KH: Yeah. The second suggestion is to upgrade your recruiting process so that you can operate like a professional and you know, a, a lot of us. Don’t do that. I’m guilty of that myself. A lot of us are guilty of that as entrepreneurs. It’s kind of just like, who do you know? You know, who’s your friends brother-in-law?
[00:14:12] You know, son or whatever your na you know, the neighbor kid or who, whoever is like, oh yeah, this, this would work. Um, and um, and there’s a time for that. You know, there, there’s certainly a time for that in business, uh, growth and, and certainly for certain types of roles, there’s always a time for adding people who are just good, good folks.
[00:14:30] Um, who can come in and start to do, uh, you know, kinda entry level roles. Uh, but the, you know, but the more refined skills that you need, the better you need to get a, a professional approach to recruiting. Um, and that would look like having a job that’s written down on paper, you know, having, having an actual job description, um, and actually having it posted somewhere and actually going through a recruiting process where you have two or three or four candidates that are really good that you can interview and then choose, you know, the best.
[00:14:59] This isn’t rocket science. Everybody knows that’s what you do if you’re doing it professionally. But the, the gap between what we know is professional and what we actually do is sometimes very, very, uh, different. And so, you know, I think that it’s on us as business owners to say, okay, I didn’t do this like a professional.
[00:15:18] Um, and I’m gonna really take it seriously, or, or am I gonna just meet a guy at Burger King and ask him if he wants to start working, you know, for me or whatever. So
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[00:16:15] MV: Burger King, I like that. Yeah. I’m not gonna create, um, many, uh, VA relationships at Burger King in London, I think. But, uh, I like the thing.
[00:16:21] Thank you. Um, one, one thing that strikes me, one reason why I think, and to be fair to myself and everyone else that I’ve met, I’m not the only person on the planet to do this. That we stuff all possible tasks into one role, is because we’ve missed an interim step, which I think is before we create an individual role, as you said, we wanna map things out.
[00:16:37] I think we need to map out not the huge future of the entire business necessarily, cause that’s maybe a bit overwhelming, but. At least what are the functions of a business? So if you looked at our business departments for a big company, it would have an HR department. Well, that’s probably not necessary when you’ve got a few people.
[00:16:53] But, um, it will have an accounting and finance department that’s very necessary. As you say, you may outsource that, but you still need to. Know who you’re hiring, and you may have choices of good, bad, and terrible accountants for that. Mm-hmm. So as you said, mm-hmm. We can’t get away with, without that.
[00:17:05] You’re gonna have a marketing department. That’s critical for those of us in instant marketing. That’s a safety zone, isn’t it? And you gotta have a product development side that’s probably you wearing all of these hats. But the point is, once you map that out, and then you look at the roles within that, first of all, you realize why you’re exhausted and why you.
[00:17:21] Been working 80 hour weeks. To your point, you do need the team, but then also you can start to create a role that isn’t gonna exhaust somebody else, cuz you’re not just recreating your nightmare life. Right. So I think one, one prelude that I’ve seen that my clients do recently, which is helpful is mapping out whole business structure in a basic way on a piece of paper.
[00:17:41] It can be. And then within that, having a role and only then putting the tasks in the role cuz you’re not. Stuff according into a pint pot, as we say in the uk. Right?
[00:17:51] KH: Yeah. And that gets kind of to the third idea here, which is take each individual role and really simplify it as much as possible and have it be focused.
[00:17:59] You just described that as you were, uh, you know, we were talking about Vaughn, our awesome, uh, podcast editor. So, so that idea of having one singular role for each person, I, that’s the ideal. Yeah. Um, and, you know, because. It just makes life simpler in terms of training, orienting new people in terms of monitoring outcomes and [00:18:20] expectations.
[00:18:20] You know, if you’ve got 10 different people on your team and all of ’em kind of, sort of do similar things, when something doesn’t get done, it’s like, well, who’s responsible for this? Well, sort of everybody, well, who didn’t do it Well, sort of everybody. Well, who’s supposed to do it? Well, sorta everybody, but that’s not a way to get clear.
[00:18:38] Who’s gonna do it tomorrow, you know? And so having a very, very focused structure where you say, Hey, so-and-so is our accountant, or, you know, so-and-so is our social media person. Um, that’s just good, you know, I guess what you would say, good fins make good neighbors, and that’s true inside of a business too.
[00:18:59] MV: Agree with that a lot. Um, just again, referencing the conversation with Jeff Sour, whose big thing now is now he’s sold his agency, is to try and help, um, I guess basically entrepreneurs managed by numbers and the. Many of that is, he’s a data driven kind of guy. He was in, you know, Google ads and that sort of thing before, but he’s come to the conclusion that you really, unless you’re really quite a big business, need to simplify the number of KPIs write down as well.
[00:19:22] So really parole, here’s rule of thumb. Now is one KPI per role? One number. Sure. Yeah. And you know, maybe two or three of you’re really pushing it and from mixed. Experience Again, I would say that’s probably true. I mean, you know, for, for Vaughn as the podcast manager, it’s like, okay, have you published the number of podcasts this week that I expect to see based on our schedule?
[00:19:42] Um, is the quality up to up to scratch? Have you included the elements? So it’s almost more qualitative, but they’re a little tick boxes we can give. Mm-hmm. And yeah, it’s pretty simple and, and once I’ve strip the roll down as we just have to content creation and then content promotion, then maybe I’d expect to.
[00:19:58] Handful of, of social media posts, but I did say even that could be seen as not necessarily a key part of the role. So we may dispose of that. It’s too complicating. No’s a tricky part. So it’s tricky part
[00:20:08] KH: as you say. Yeah. Yeah. Here, here’s a tricky part of this one. Uh, you have to also treat yourself in the same manner, and that means you define your role and you don’t get to do everyth.
[00:20:22] And you actually, you know, because we can be our worst enemy in that regard, where we think because it’s our business, we actually technically can do any job. And that could be very frustrating for team members. Um, if you’re the boss and you do something, but your team member is hired to do that, you’re really, really sending a horrible social signal, which is, uh, first of all, they’re not needed.
[00:20:45] Second of all, you think you can do it better than. Uh, you know, third of all maybe did you not trust them to do it? You know, it’s like really, really bad performance idea to, uh, allow ourselves to have free range as the owners of our business to do anything. And you learn that over time. As people get mad at you and quit.
[00:21:05] Yeah. Get frustrated. You know? So, yeah, I
[00:21:09] MV: have to say that’s interesting. Uh, there are certain times where I plunge in and do things myself, and that reminds you of my mom, who is not the greatest manager. She had many virtues as a, a teacher and as a mum, you know, management was probably not her bag. And I remember saying, I goodness sake, let me do it myself.
[00:21:24] And I remember thinking at the time I was 12, I, I was possibly wise enough to keep my mouth shut. But you are not gonna end use the 12 year old to. Cooking, washing up, whatever it was I wasn’t doing, um, by saying, get out of the way. It’s rubbish. I’ll do it myself. And so I’ve done that. I notice I have a tendency there, but I also reasonably disciplined at saying, I’m not happy with this.
[00:21:44] Redo it. I’ll check it tomorrow, and therefore, I may not be being nice, but I’m staying in the boss role. That’s the person who defines the tasks and then checks that they’re being done to an adequate level and bouncing it back to the person that do the actual job. Even though it’ll be quicker in many cases, for me to just get in there and and re-edit a podcast or something, for example, that came up a couple of days ago.
[00:22:03] It was nothing terrible. I just thought, hmm, he’s missed a couple of things. But yeah, as you say then, that, that’s really, uh, the best thing to avoid because it, as you say, it sends terrible signals. Even worse, it means you get drawn back into doing everything and then you’ll end up going mad. And that kind of defeats the purpose in the first place, doesn’t it?
[00:22:20] Totally does,
[00:22:21] KH: doesn’t it? Yeah. Does. Yeah. So
[00:22:23] MV: that’s, so let’s move on to the, the fourth of your, um, ways to, to move through this stuff. Yeah.
[00:22:28] KH: Fourth idea is you wanna believe the best about people and give people a fighting chance to win your trust and, And your long-term, you know, employment or relationship.
[00:22:39] Sometimes, sometimes it takes time to get people settled into the right, um, niche or area of, of effort and activity. Sometimes it’s not immediately clear. Sometimes it, um, it doesn’t fit right in the first go round of a role or responsibility. Um, Uh, and, and I think that we sometimes can be too quick to say, you know what?
[00:23:03] This is just not working. I’m done with this. Um, and we, if we do that, if we, if we, you know, um, if we do that, we’re being short-sighted. Um, because that, that idea of having one person for one role, and if they don’t fit. Uh, we, you know, we dismiss them. That I think it, it can be shortsighted because if we’ve done a good job recruiting and we found somebody we really like, and we really feel like is a, could be a good team member, um, then, then it, you know, it’s, it’s, it behooves us to find the right fit for them over time.
[00:23:38] And when we can do that, then they’ll flourish. Yeah. And, and it’s almost like what, you know, what part of the garden is someone planted in? And sometimes we plant them in the wrong. And it’s us, up to us to be a good steward of, uh, you know, their talents and skills and say, Hey, you know, there’s another place where you might flourish.
[00:23:57] And, you know, as a, in my olden job day’s job as a human resources generalist and then VP of, uh, of human resources, I, I used to encounter these cases where there would be people who were exceptionally. But they, you know, maybe they didn’t get along with their boss or their boss just didn’t see the value in them or whatever, but their team loved ’em.
[00:24:16] Or you know, maybe their team hated ’em, but their boss loved ’em cuz they had a skillset, you know? And so then they was better positioned as a solo, you know, duty or role, not so much of being a part of a team. Um, or maybe the team just wasn’t the right team for them, but they had great skillsets and they were unhappy.
[00:24:33] Um, and there’s a lot of scenarios in which things cannot. But, um, it’s up to us as the big boss to figure out, okay, how, how do we make this seem, uh, like, like a perfect, you know, opportunity for the person and a good win for the business as well. And, uh, and that can be hard work sometimes and can take time.
[00:24:52] Yeah,
[00:24:53] MV: it’s interesting. Couple of reflections. I mean, first of all, um, the sort of theory, if you like, business theory, Jim Collins says, get the right people on the bus and then, you know, get them in the right seats. Yeah. And if I’m not misquoting the great business thinker, I think it’s in that order, isn’t it?
[00:25:06] If I remember. Mm-hmm. Whichever is good to create one of the book. That’s right. So that implies, you know, having taste in people and, and recognizing talent and, and work ethic and the basic qualities you’d want in good employees or, or staff, whatever their relationship is. Um, Is the primary thing, and then you have to do exactly what you’re saying, which is figure out where they belong.
[00:25:24] And the second thing that strikes me is just having the humility, uh, certainly knowing that I’m not the greatest manager for, for sure. Um, I don’t come a great managerial stock. I come of teaching stock, so teaching’s in my blood management may be less. And, and therefore to figure out that my first few hires, I’m probably gonna get a bit wrong and give myself and the Harry.
[00:25:44] Time to see that if we can be sorted before we say goodbye. Yeah, yeah. Whereas, you know, in 20 years high as time, you know, maybe I’m gonna be more slick with it and I’ll be able to read the future more accurately and go, this isn’t gonna work out. And I think that’s okay if you have experience, but I don’t have that experience yet.
[00:25:58] I mean, you may do with your HR
[00:26:00] KH: background, I guess maybe, but maybe over time you just get better at realizing. The process you’re in, you know, maybe you just get clearer that like, okay, job one didn’t work for this person. I’m gonna try a job two or, and then, you know, see if that works. And, and, um, I think what happens over time is you get better at, at your own mindset as it relates to these situations.
[00:26:19] Because in the moment it can be insanely frustrating and you can, you know, your, your temper can get the best of you or your, your frustration. And, um, but I think. I’m not sure anybody gets good at becoming a manager. I think you become aware that you’re being a good manager or, or a bad manager. And, and I would also talk myself up into that bucket of saying, I know I’m not a good manager frequently, but at least I understand where I’m at in the process of like, okay, what would it look like for me to be a good manager right now?
[00:26:49] Um, and generally speaking, that’s become clearer with your expectations. Become better. Loving accountability, but you know, the accountability that’s done in grace, uh, but cla clarity and then also third, recognizing what is not working and dealing with it, not putting your head in the sand. Um, and, and I think that’s kind of what the more mature managers over time get good at is those steps like where they’re at in the process and picking a, picking a.
[00:27:21] You know, staff member, I’m not sure anybody gets perfect at it over time. I think you just do your best and you roll with the punches. And [00:27:30] like Mike Tyson said, everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face. And then it’s kind of like, what do you do next? You know? Well, that’s quite, hopefully not literally punched in the face by your employees.
[00:27:41] MV: I would’ve gone down badly. I mean, I think, yeah, some of my employees are probably quite grateful. They’re, they’re third of the world away in some cases, but yeah. Yeah, I suppose the word humility still seems to apply. Yeah. Reco self-awareness, as you mentioned. I think that, um, I think really to put it in a nutshell, recognizing what’s not working, having the courage to deal with it, but also recognizing if you are like me, a natural or I arrestable, uh, artistic type, I’m a perfectionist.
[00:28:04] I tend to get emotional and I, and my team knows this now, I say them. Okay. You know, like this is always my first reaction. Um, but let, let’s see if we can sort this out. Um, and normally I’ll find there are quite a lot shortcomings the way, shortcomings in the way I structure things and the way I communicated things.
[00:28:19] And that’s good because I can change that. Some of the stuff is shortcomings in my staff and I can either find them or I can accept that and work within that. The latter being more of a learning path for me. I mean, if I just find somebody, yes, I’ll learn how to recruit more people, but it doesn’t force me to.
[00:28:35] You know, the limitations and work around limitations of people, I guess. Yeah. And that’s really my learning recently is a bit like, you know, I used, when I used to teach a lot of kids in the piano, you know, they ain’t gonna recognize middle C quicker than they learn. They, they just, they’re gonna do the practice, they practice.
[00:28:50] I can’t control whether their parents make them practice. Mm-hmm. But I can try to manage the situation in front of me and that is within my power. And it turns out that if you accept a certain speed of learning or operation, That can work as long as you know what to expect. Mm-hmm. If you expect this much work in this much time and they don’t deliver, then you have one of those has gotta adjust.
[00:29:11] Mm-hmm. It’s basically my expectation. Yeah. Anyway, right. Let’s go on to the next one.
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